Spurs hammered

The bonuses paid to bankers will total £6bn (Treasury signs a truce with the banks – and back come bonuses, 10 February). This needs a simple metric. The mean income for those in full-time paid employment is about £25,000. Thus these bonuses equate to 240,000 jobs. This means that 240,000 socially useful jobs in the public sector to help the young, the elderly and the sick and support public services could have been saved if these bonuses were not paid. Not much to ask.

Dr David Drew

Sheffield

• If a woman can be stripped of her damehood over a relatively trivial affair (Headteacher who promoted her twin is stripped of damehood, 11 February), why it is not possible to do this with tax exiles and non-domiciled tax scroungers, along with bankers like Sir Fred Goodwin who were given awards in a bout of irrational exuberance before the financial collapse?

David Nowell

New Barnet, Hertfordshire

• Leila Ward (Letters, 9 February) takes you to task for failing to say Jean de Florette was a book by Marcel Pagnol "before it was made into a film". In fact it went from film to book then back again: in the early 60s Pagnol's two-part novel L'Eau des Collines was worked up from the scenario of Manon des Sources (1952), before itself being adapted by Claude Berri and Gérard Brach for the screen in 1986.

Geoff Woollen

Glasgow

• When being presented to Elizabeth I, the nervous Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was unable to prevent a loud fart (Letters, 11 February). Mortified, he did not attend court for seven years. When he summoned up the courage he presented himself to the queen, who said: "We have forgot the fart, my Lord."

Joe Haynes

Wargrave, Berkshire

• It seems Tottenham Hotspur are not the preferred tenant of the Olympics arena post-2012 (Sport, 11 February). Is this because "The New Stadium" is an anagram of West Ham United?